Ollie Williams weighs whether frontend tooling still earns its place in 2026. Vendor prefixes and Sass fade as CSS gains nesting, custom properties, and color functions, yet bundling and minification still pay off for compression and fewer requests. On the JS side, module preloading can replace bundling for small projects, transpilers default to modern output, and JSDoc adds types without a build step.
Do we still need build tools?
